Authors Electric

 This is my last regular blog post for Authors Electric, so I would like to say farewell and thank you to everyone who has read and commented on my posts over the past couple of years, and for the support of both my fellow author/bloggers and readers. It’s been an exciting time for me since publishing my first children’s novel The Order of the White Boar in October 2017, and I’ve enjoyed sharing the ups and downs of life as a newbie indie author with you all. But I’ve come to realize that a commitment to writing a monthly blog results in time spent away from getting on with the novel writing itself (which is already rather far down the pecking order in terms of time spent). So I’ve sadly decided to call it a day. But I’m calling it a day on a day when the launch has happened of a wonderful charity auction of books! For the next 62 days, until the Friday that is the annual BBC Children in Need day, an auction of more than 500 titles across a range of genres will be underway at ...

Since 23 March, when lockdown was announced in the UK, I’ve found myself seeking solace in familiar books. This isn’t something I do regularly – unlike my eldest daughter, who re-reads certain books repeatedly, what she calls ‘comfort reading’, particularly at times of stress. Apparently reading the Harry Potter books or Jane Austen’s entire oeuvre is the thing to help get her through public exams or, indeed, starting as a junior doctor during a pandemic. She also turns to familiar films – almost anything by Disney, various (often rather cheesy) musicals, etc. at such times. For me, generally, if I’ve read a book or seen a film so recently that I can remember the ending (let alone how the plot takes us there), it’s far too soon to experience it again. ( Star Wars is about the only exception – oh, and The Adventures of Robin Hood ; I can never have too much of Errol Flynn’s blithe, sunny optimism and desperate historical inaccuracy…) My only regular re-reading is the ann...

I’ve never been a ‘foodie’, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘a  person  who  loves   food  and is very  interested  in different  types  of  food ’, let alone any type of gourmet or epicure. I once traumatized my closest friend in my early teens by saying I’d be happy enough to live on food pills. I had read and watched a lot of science fiction in which the shiny folk of the future (this was the 1970s and 1980s when the iconic year 2000 was still a long way off) wouldn’t waste precious leisure time cooking and would simply knock back a couple of pills to keep themselves going while conquering new worlds. ( Soylent Green hadn’t penetrated my consciousness at that point.) My friend recently reminded me of that – in her eyes – faux pas. Food had always been important to her and her family, whereas I was brought up on a typical British working-class family diet for that time: meat and two veg, always potatoes, a roast on Sunda...

This week has seen the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) on 8 May and also the annual Europe Day on the 9th,  a celebration of all the years of peace in the heart of the continent. As part of the commemoration of those six years of World War II that came to an end in May of 1945, I was delighted to interview the authors of  six novels brought together in a collection titled   The Road to Liberation . The authors - Marion Kummerow, Marina Osipova, Rachel Wesson, J.J. Toner, Ellie Midwood and Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger -  offer a fascinating range of perspectives on that global conflict. They hail from various countries – Germany, Russia, Ireland, the USA – and their books (in the words of its blurb) ‘will transport you across countries and continents during the final days’ of the Second World War, ‘revealing the high price of freedom—and why it is still so necessary to “never forget”’. While my own writing has focused on a far earlier era, a...